Click on the links below to jump to specific sections

Kindle eBook
Nook eBook
Apple App Store App

Gifting a Kindle eBook
Amazon makes gifting eBooks very easy, providing you the ability to give via email or print our a gift coupon for in-person giving. You can also set the gift to be delivered in the future, plus include a personalized message.

For this example, we will use The Judas Conspiracy by Leslie Winfield Williams as the Kindle book we want to gift.

1. Navigate to the book’s Kindle Page (for The Judas Conspiracy, the URL is http://www.amazon.com/The-Judas-Conspiracy-ebook/dp/B004EHZTWY); (If you happen to get to the book’s paperback page, simple click the link for “Kindle Edition” as in the first image below).
2. Click on the yellow “Give as a Gift” button (If you have not already logged in to your Amazon account, you may now be prompted to do so).
3. You should now be on the “Complete your gift purchase” page. You can choose to either “Email the gift directly to my recipient” or “Email the gift to me”.
4. If you do not already have payment information associated with your Amazon account, you will be prompted for payment info.
5. Click either “Place your order” buttons and you are done.

Gifting a Barnes & Noble Nook Book

Barnes and Noble also gives you the opportunity to gift their ebooks with only the recipients email address and your good intentions!

For this example, we will use Jade: The Law by Robert Flynn as the nook book we would like to gift.

1. Navigate to the book’s nook book page (for Jade: The Law, the URL is http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jade-robert-flynn/1029162286?ean=2940013239623). (Again, if you end up on the book’s paperback page, scroll down and select the “NOOK book” or eBook page).
2. Click on the “Buy as Gift” link as indicated in the image below (if you have not already logged in to you Barnes & Noble account, you will be prompted to do so);
3. The “Personalize your eGift” window will pop-up, as in the image below. Fill out the information as in the example;
4. If you click on the “Not a gift” link, the process reverts to simply purchasing the nook book for yourself (always a good option!).
5. Click “Submit” (if your account does not have payment information associated with it, you will be prompted to input it).

Gifting an App from the Apple App Store
For this example, we will use the enhanced eBook app Grand Canyon, available in the App Store at this link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grand-canyon-multimedia-adventure/id452174804?mt=8

The examples and screen shots for this type of gifting will depend on whether you are using iTunes on a PC/Mac, or if you are using iTunes on a iOS device (iPhone/iPad/iPod).

1. Navigate to the app’s page in the App Store. The easiest way to do this is to search for “JoSara”, and then click on the thumbnail image;
2. Below is what the search results page looks like on an iPad;
3. Click on the app that you want to gift (the Grand Canyon app is an excellent choice, thanks!). You will then get to the app’s page in the App Store. Below is the image of the apps page in iTunes on Windows;
4. And below is what the app’s page looks like on an iPad;
5. On your iPad, gifting the app starts when you click the “Gift This App” link on the upper right of the app’s page;
6. On your iPhone or iPod, you have to scroll down on the app’s page to below the “Screenshots” section, where you will find buttons for “Tell a Friend” and “Gift this App”;
7. On iTunes, you need to click on the drop down arrow as indicated in the screenshot below to get to the “Gift this App” link;
8. Clicking on the “Gift this App” link wil prompt you for your iTunes account information;
9. If you are doing this from within iTunes, the following very green screen appears (notice the pretty five-star reviews!). Again, you have the option of gifting via email, or of having the gift sent to you for in-person delivery;
10. Once you fill out all of the information, you are given a final screen to review before you “Buy Gift”;
11. The process on iOS devices is the same after clicking the “Gift this App” link.

If you have any questions or comments about this process, do not hesitate to contact us. And happy gift giving!

The story describes the time in America before the Civil War.

America in the early 1800s was a cultural blank canvas, a barren landscape awaiting texture in the form of learning, literature and the arts.

Geraldine Priest creates this fictional historical memoir of Eliza Rupp, the embodiment of the many Americans striving to fill that void. The story of Eliza’s family and her study of piano are interwoven with
those of the leading literati, artists and educators of the day. Like so many of them, she journeys to Europe to further her studies and make her own cultural contribution to America’s Barren Landscape.

The genesis of the story is told excellently by Jerry in her Foreword:

From a lifelong love of history, music and the arts began to grow some years ago a vague but nagging feeling that I needed somehow to pull these things together. I had not a clue as to how to go about it until I came across a paragraph in Henry James’ biography of Hawthorne which struck me like a lightning bolt and became the starting point as well as the pervasive theme of this book.

In a backward glance at a simpler time, when our New World seemed so full of promise, when our stresses were more limited in scope, and with an innate affinity for the beginnings of things, I have told this story of one family’s struggle with what Henry James describes as a time of “a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials for such
pursuits. Small things were made to do large service.” Many, like James, found the American cultural landscape too bleak and spent their creative lives in Europe. To others, like Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Bulfinch, we are grateful for a culture of our own. Has all their striving come to naught in our time?

In writing A Barren Landscape my aim has been to present a broad overview of America’s cultural history in the fifty years before the Civil War – that great cataclysm that ended our young country’s age of innocence. While the book is built around a fictional family, and in the format of a nineteenth century memoir, historical accuracy has been my primary concern; even the story of the Old Elm in Boston Common
is authentic, having been found in a very old book in Boston. As for the paragraph from Henry James quoted at the outset, I leave it to the reader to decide if it seems unduly harsh.
Geraldine Smith Priest

The reader can find where to purchase this book in all its versions on our books page.

August 1, 2011 – As a lover of books and technology, I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years investigating how to combine them. The proliferation of tablet computing, and the need/availability for interaction, have pushed us to a point where a book can be more. Terms like enhanced eBook, interactive eBook and others have been bandied about; but whatever the term, adding multimedia to a print book turns it into something more.

We also recently have been working with non-profit organizations, such as my friends at the Texas State Historical Association, helping them to take their unique and valuable content (most of it in print format, or even out-of-print) and get it into a digitized, interactive medium…into a format that will continue to promote their goals of education, research, preservation and membership.

I stumbled across the work of some fine people utilizing HTML5 to build enhanced eBooks. With the current ePub standard, there is no standard support for adding multimedia; Amazon’s Kindle format provides some, but only on certain platforms.

With these converging trends, technologies and paths, I’ve put together an app for the Apple App Store that is an experiment of sorts; a proof point, if you will, that not only can you build an entertaining enhanced eBook, but that utilizing available content that you can use this content as a bridge to sustainable funding for non-profits.

With that introduction, we are happy to announce:

Cecil does the GRAND CANYON holding a poptart

If you want to reflect back on a trip you made to the Grand Canyon, one of the eight natural wonders of the world, or you just want to imagine one, this app will take you there.

With proceeds benefiting the Grand Canyon Association, this Grand Canyon app follows the author, friends and guides as they:

• hike down Bright Angel Trail;
• raft one hundred miles down the Colorado River;
• hike the so-called “Death March” hike to Thunder River and Surprise Valley;
• visit Havasu;
• brave Lava Falls (and live to tell about it);
• helicopter out from Whitemore Wash.

Containing hi-definition videos, hundreds of photos, maps and the story of the journey, this multimedia application will be sure to remind you of your own trip to the Grand Canyon…or increase your desire to visit.

To read an excerpt, click here.

To find where to purchase, click here.

From the article (entitled “Div School is the setting for murder mystery”):

“The Judas Conspiracy,” a new novel by Leslie Williams DIV ’11, takes place in Great Britain and at the Yale Divinity School. The novel, which will be released Dec. 1, centers on the search for a complete manuscript of the real, much-debated Gospel of Judas, which says that Jesus had commanded his disciple Judas to turn him over to the Romans and runs counter to the traditional story that Judas betrayed Jesus. The book has strong connections to Yale and New Haven: Its two protagonists are a New Haven police officer and the nephew of the dean of the Divinity School, who join forces to track down the Gospel of Judas before a murderous secret brotherhood finds it.

Emily Suran

“The Judas Conspiracy” was written by Leslie Williams DIV ‘11.

“I’ve always been interested in writing thrillers,” said Williams, 73. “[I thought] this would be something different and fun.”

The novel, set in 2008, follows the re-emergence of the complete Gospel of Judas in New England, at the Divinity School. Members of an ancient secret society called the Sethian Brotherhood try to regain the manuscript of the Gospel of Judas, which they owned for over a thousand years before losing it to Henry VIII in 1539. The Gospel of Judas is set to be donated to the Divinity School by a fictional dean, but is lost again before the dean can formally turn it over to his school. While the protagonists try to find the brotherhood, its members commit multiple murders and concoct a plan to blow up a national monument, whose identity Williams asked to keep secret before the book’s release.

Williams, a novelist and nonfiction writer, said she was inspired to set the story at Yale after spending 2004 and 2007 at the Divinity School as a visiting scholar and enrolling in the one-year master of sacred theology degree program at the school this year. Long before studying at Yale, Williams spent part of her childhood in New Haven while her father attended graduate school at Yale.

Kindle provides a download of a free sample on their site.

I Insist I am not Dead

My best efforts to exceed

the frame of my flesh

have led only to

renewed efforts.

Daily, God’s slow heavy hand swings closer

to brush me off his arm like a stinging fly,

and I am called, in humility, to be thankful

he doesn’t choose to crush me instead.

We are living well here, in spite of everything.

For as long as we can we will try to live forever.

Land Again

Coming down quickly

we all experience descent disorientation,

fighting to keep our feet firmly beneath us

as we explode to land again.

We will limp uncertainly for weeks,

wasting little time to re-immerse ourselves

in conversations we left behind when we first

turned expectant eyes toward flight.

How long is it we’ve known each other now?

The years coil around us so that when

god splits open our souls he can gauge our age,

reading striations like the rings in older trees;

we have to be laid bare for judgment.

I expect that we will linger

for long days in the sun,

bolted upright to rocks to provide

sustenance for eagles.

They will carry our names back to their children,

and when they unhinge great golden beaks

our memory will rain out into eager mouths

so that they might carry us in flight again

to all the lightless desolate regions of the earth.

© 2010 by Joe Zoccoli

I’ve read many books about the Great War and about Stalingrad and the other horrors of World War Two, but THE LAST KLICK, because it comes out of a contemporary sensibility, presents a greater challenge to the feelings. The madness of jungle warfare is matched moreover by the wicked idiocy of press and television. The United States seen from Vietnam is even more distorting than the experiences of combat. Written with passion and great skill — SAUL BELLOW

Twenty odd years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few days traveling around Vietnam with Robert Flynn who was then a freelance correspondent for True Magazine. Now, after finishing THE LAST KLICK, I know what he was really up to. He has done a wonderful job of recreating the sights and sounds and smells fo Vietnam, and he has captured the ambitions, pretensions and cynicism of the international press corps that covered the war. — STEVE KROFT, 60 Minutes (CBS)

At Smashwords, eBooks can be viewed or downloaded in multiple formats, such as HTML, ePub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others), LRF (for Sony Reader), Palm Doc (for Palm reading devices) and other popular formats.

Dusk Before the Dawn was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award.